It turned out that SAT scores and the prestige of a candidate’s alma mater were not predictive at all. Neither was winning programming competitions. Grades mattered a little, but only for the first three years after you graduated. “But the real surprise for me and for a lot of people at Google,” Carlisle told me, “was that when we analyzed the data we couldn’t find a single variable that mattered for even most of the jobs at Google. Not one.”
